“Oh,” she said as he dropped the shirt, “your bruise.”

She had not realized that any of Viscount Uxbury’s punches had found its mark. It was below his right shoulder, where it met the arm, a bruise that looked red and raw and had not yet turned black or purple or all the colors of the rainbow. He looked down at it.

“A mere nothing,” he said. “I ran into a door.”

“Oh, that is such a cliché,” she said. “I expected better of you.”

There was a gleam of something like amusement in his eyes. “The worst thing anyone can say of me, Anna,” he said, “is that I lack originality. You cut me to the quick. However, you are quite right. Let me be more specific. A door ran into me.”

She surprised herself by laughing. “You are so absurd,” she said.

He tipped his head to one side and looked down at her, that suggestion of amusement still in his eyes. But he did not say anything. He proceeded to remove his pantaloons and his drawers.

She was twenty-five years old and a total innocent. She knew what a man looked like only because on one visit to the bookshop in Bath she had leafed through a volume about ancient Greece and come across pictures of sculptures of various gods and heroes. She had been both shocked and fascinated and had thought how unfair it was that the male physique was so much more attractive than the female—though perhaps she had thought that only because she was looking through female eyes. She had put the book back on the shelf with a guilty glance around to see that she was not being observed, and had never looked again.

Avery was more beautiful than any of those gods and heroes, perhaps because he was real flesh and blood. He was perfection itself.

He set one knee on the bed beside her and braced his hands on either side of her as he swung across to straddle her. With his knees he pressed her own together and moved his hands over her again. He lifted her breasts in the cleft between his thumbs and forefingers and set the pads of his thumbs over her nipples. He rubbed them in light circles and pulsed lightly against them until she felt such a raw . . . something that she closed her eyes and lifted herself closer. His mouth came to her shoulder, across to the hollow between it and her neck, to her throat—open, hot, wet. And he was down on her then, the full length of his legs clamping hers tightly together while his hands moved beneath her and down to cup her bottom while he rubbed himself against the tops of her legs and she could feel him hard and long and alien.

He moved his mouth to the other side of her neck and along her shoulder as one of his hands came between them and his fingers worked their way between her tight thighs and down into folds and depths until one finger came right inside her to the knuckle and she stiffened with mingled shock and embarrassment and longing. His legs pressed more tightly against the outsides of hers. She could hear wetness as he moved his finger, drawing it out, sliding it in again.

“Beautiful, beautiful,” he said, his mouth against her temple.

He raised his head to look down at her as his hands hooked beneath her legs and drew them wide and wrapped them about his own as he came between. He moved his hands beneath her again to lift and hold her. She felt him hard and hot where his finger had been, and then he came into her with one firm thrust. His eyes watched her while shock, pain, and something beyond words or thought engulfed her. He held still and deep in her while her mind and body grappled with a new reality and the tension went gradually out of her.

“Ah, my poor Anna,” he murmured. “So hot, so beautiful. There was no way not to hurt you, you see. But only this time. Not next time or ever again. It is my promise to you.”

She touched him. She set her hands on either side of his waist—hard, firm muscled, so unlike her own. And she moved them to his back, along the column of his spine, down to rest lightly over tight buttocks. He drew slowly out of her, muscles relaxing beneath her hands, and she did not want to let him go. And then the muscles tightened and he came in again, hard and firm and deep. He turned his head to rest beside hers on the pillow and took some of his weight onto his elbows and forearms, though his chest pressed against her breasts and his shoulders held hers to the bed. He moved into her and out of her with a firm, steady rhythm. There was sound—a wet suck and pull, a slight squeak of the bed, labored breathing, laughter from a distance down the street. There was sensation, weight pinning her to the bed, heat, the slight coolness of air coming through the window and finding its way through or past the curtains, the hardness of him inside her, smooth, wet, not quite painful. She did not want it to end. She wanted it to go on forever.

Forever lasted a long time and no time at all. The rhythm broke and he pressed hard into her until there was no deeper to come, and while he murmured something unintelligible against her ear, she felt a gush of liquid heat inside and knew that it was finished. His full weight relaxed down onto her then and she wrapped her arms about his waist and untwined her legs from about his to set her feet flat on the bed. After a few moments he sighed against her ear, withdrew from her, and rolled off her to recline beside her, his head propped on one hand.

“Wedded and bedded,” he said. “Anna Snow no more or even Anastasia Westcott. My wife, instead. My duchess. Is it such a terrible fate, Anna?”

There was something very like wistfulness in his voice.

“No,” she said, and she smiled. “My duke.”

He got off the bed then, picked up one of the keys he had dropped onto the dressing table, unlocked the dressing room door, and went inside. He came back a few moments later, a small towel in his hand. He locked the door again and got back into bed, drew the upper sheet and one blanket over them, and slid an arm beneath her shoulders to turn her onto her side facing him. He slipped the towel between her thighs, spread it, and held it gently against her before removing his hand and leaving the towel where it was. It felt soothing. He arranged the covers over them and drew her closer. Within moments he was asleep.